


Power and Responsibilty

by summerjuliet



Category: Star Wars Legends: The Old Republic
Genre: characters and content tags to be updated
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-24
Updated: 2017-03-03
Packaged: 2018-08-24 09:32:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8367250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/summerjuliet/pseuds/summerjuliet
Summary: Dumping ground for one shots for my characters, because dear god I made one alt and here we are. Currently starring Ace the Inquisitor, Esme the Smuggler, and Nataam the Agent. The others coming soon.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Anyway I'm awful at summaries but there's a certain something about the fact that the very first fic I ever posted was about this exact same character before I actually gave her a backstory and stuff. Spoilers for Quesh here!  
> Anything in italics is either one of the ghosts speaking directly, or a thought processed influenced by the ghosts. Ace is not doing great here.

There is a sound like thunder. 

Corrin recognizes it even when weak, even when she's on the second floor of the base. It is the sound that follows lightning, the sound that precedes her young master. She and Kaal had once told the Sith that she should choose Tonitrus as her new name. Corrin can almost see her below them, a whirlwind of red light and purple lightning, cutting down enemies with the wild, untrained swings so characteristic of the former slave’s fighting style.

Kaal is dead. She knows that. She can feel that the life has left his body, lying beside of her. She knows that she will not survive for much longer either. She just wants to live long enough to see the fear on Cineratus’s face when he realizes who he’s up against. She just wants that much satisfaction.

And Cineratus does appear to be at least a little nervous. At the first crash of thunder, he looks away, staring at the door, but confident in his guards. Then the thunder comes back, closer. Someone yells. Corrin can’t make out the words, but she knows the tone well enough. Desperation. Fear. They are being obliterated. 

“She’s coming,” Corrin whispers, drawing Cineratus’s attention again. There is the sound of boots on stairs, closer, closer, and Cineratus curls his lip. “She’ll kill you.”

Three things happen simultaneously, but Corrin is only aware of two of them: first, the metal door is torn open, the form of her master standing on the other side, alight with power, a young Togruta not far behind her. Then there is a crack, and then there is no more.

***

  
Ashara, on the other hand, is very aware of all three things. Ace, the strange redhaired Sith that had taken her in on Taris holds her hands out and tears a hole through a solid metal door in a display of Force that would never have been sanctioned by...well, anyone. Ace steps through into the room with lightning crackling at her hands and the same slightly purple glow she’s given off ever since she absorbed that ghost.

Ashara follows behind her and clears the twisted metal just in time to see the man snap the neck of a girl on the floor. Corrin, she thinks. One of Ace’s other apprentices. The reason they’re on the forsaken planet in the first place--as soon as Ace had heard they were in trouble, she’d ordered Andronikos to turn the ship around, they were going to Quesh immediately. There’s a pang of some emotion in her chest. Pride, maybe, or comfort, that should anything happen to her, Ace would either rescue her or avenge her in a way no Jedi would.

There’s a pause where Ace processes the situation. Ashara hears her draw in a ragged breath as she looks at Corrin's body, the head of it twisted at an awful angle. Then she screams.

Ashara’s first instinct is to cover her ears, then to reach out and touch Ace’s shoulder, then to cower away from the girl. She does none of those in the end. She’s rooted to the spot, staring at Ace, who crosses her arms over her chest as she screams, as if to hold something precious inside of herself. It’s a sound of such pain, a display of such weakness, that Ashara would never have thought a Sith capable of it. The sound of a mother who has just watched her child be killed in front of her eyes.

The male Sith seems equally taken aback by it. He holds his hands out and takes a few steps away. “My Lord, I assure you, this was nothing personal, I just prefer to stay off of Thanaton’s--”

Ace is across the room in a blink of Ashara’s eyes, saber drawn and piercing through the heart of the man. His corpse hits the ground as soon as she turns the blade off. 

“Ace, I’m--I’m so sorry,” Ashara can think of nothing else to say.

Ace kneels next to the bodies of her former apprentices, checking their pulses and gently turning Corrin’s head as if it would bring her back to life. Her chest is too tight, there’s a pain in her ribs, she can’t breathe, she can’t breathe, they’re not supposed to be dead, _they’re just apprentices, Little Snake._

It’s the voice that is not her own that snaps Ace back to reality. She swallows the panic attack that builds in her chest, blinks back tears that burn her eyes. She cannot be weak. Not like this. Not when she has this much power.

“Call the ship, Ashara,” She finally forces the words out. “Tell...Tell Khem Val to join us. No, Andronikos. Call Andronikos. Khem Val would--nevermind that. Get Andronikos here. You and I can’t carry both of them, and I intend to see that they’re given a proper funeral.”

Ashara steps out into the hall to use her communicator, a tiny act that Ace is immensely grateful for. She pulls her knees up to her chest and presses the heels of her palms into her eyes and thinks. 

This is Thanaton’s fault. Corrin and Kaal were never supposed to be in danger. _Apprentices die all the time_. Yes, but not her apprentices. She would never be a master like Zash or the dozens of others she’d met, _she will be a weaker Sith_. She would not risk her apprentices’ lives, she wouldn’t pit them against each other, _a living apprentice will kill her in the end_ , then so be it, let them kill her, let them be stronger for it, but how dare Thanaton lay a hand on them...

_She will tear his spine from his body_.


	2. What's In A Name

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's not easy being an alien in the Empire.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi I'm Rose and I love Chiss. All Cheunh words taken from the Coruscant Translator. This is set during the Agent's first trip to Drommund Kaas.

Nataam keeps an apartment in Kaas City for the convenience of it. She will never consider it home, she’ll never consider the dark planet with its constant storms to be anything like a home, but it is easy to have a place so close to Intelligence. It’s even nicer now that she’s traveling with a spare Rattataki, because it’s much easier to give Kaliyo her keys and tell her to make herself at home than it is to try and get her to be silent during a meeting.

The door is unlocked when she tries it. She nudges it open with her foot, her arms too full of groceries to be useful. Kaliyo is draped over her couch with some decidedly scripted fighting program on the television. Nataam doesn’t bother calling out.

Kaliyo is behind her in a heartbeat anyway, probably lured by the smell of fresh meat, Nataam thinks. It’s an ugly thing to think and for a moment she feels bad, but Kaliyo’s not a mind reader.

“You spill something on the way home, agent?” She asks.

Nataam looks down at herself. Oh. “It’s not my blood. A man called me his ‘pretty alien’ and tried to touch me.”

“How many fingers is he missing?”

“It’s not cannibalism if you aren’t the same species, correct?” Nataam asks, putting something wrapped in a sheet of butcher paper into the freezer.

For the first time since they met, Kaliyo is speechless.

***

Her name is Bittna’taa’mothu, not Nataam, not Nata, not any of the other bastardizations of her name she has heard the humans create. She has stopped giving out her full name because she can no longer stand to hear it so butchered by everyone she meets. She’s been away from Csilla for two years and it has been too long. There are not enough Chiss in Imperial space. Not that she can blame them. The planets here are so different from Csilla, the people so decidedly non-Chiss, that she would have returned home in an instant if she weren’t contractually obligated to remain.

 _Csutar_. To endure, to tolerate. That’s all she feels like she does, speaking Cheunh to herself when she’s alone, saying her own name aloud when she has been bounced from assignment to assignment and has heard herself called Nataam too many times. She endures every person who calls her their pretty alien, she endures the horrible robotic Cheunh that her earpiece uses when she doesn’t want to hear Basic anymore, she endures the warm weather and the constant storms and the Sith that want to rule her and the constant groveling to the Empire. The Chiss have more rights than any other alien in Imperial space, but she is still an alien, as everyone is so keen to remind her, and the role of the loyal agent is one she’s played for so long that it begins to feel less like an act and more like a betrayal of herself.

_Lah ch’abusah_ , she adores, the Ascendancy. She loves Csilla. She loves her people and her home. And thus, by extension, she should love the Empire. She should love their harsh worlds and words. And yet there is nothing in her heart but loyalty to the Ascendancy. She does what the Empire asks of her because, in the end, it will benefit her people. She has seen the Empire betray too many. They will betray the Chiss one day, as well, and they must be ready for it.

But she is not miserable. She does enjoy her job, even if she does not love her employer, but that isn’t uncommon. Imperial Intelligence lets her be the best that she can be. She has always had an affinity for lying and manipulating people, even for ugly tasks like murder. She sees things practically. The shortest distance between two points, so to speak. There is no other job where she could legally do the things she does with a pay grade as good as she’s getting. Plus, there’s a perverse delight in telling everyone who leers at her that she is fifteen. And Kaliyo makes things better, even if they disagree more often than not.

There is an irony in her job, though. Keeper and Watcher Two explain what being a Cipher Agent means. She will become whoever is needed to get the job done. She will be anyone anywhere. And yet she will always be their alien agent. Strange, then, that they’re the ones who will not let her change.

Still, she bides her time. _Csutar_. Endure.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The cannibalism is a joke, Nataam is an awful person, it was space pork chops not a man's fingers. She is in fact 15 because thanks rapid alien aging.


	3. Lucky

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Esme, and her relationship with the Force.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Esme is Ace's younger sister, who got what Ace calls "the majority of Kallig's power". Her entire character is also based on "kid gets in way over her head, bluffs her way out of her problems".

The first time Esme discovered she could make other people do what she wanted them to, it was an accident. She was thirteen years old and she and her friends were trying to empty a shopkeeper’s till. They’d sent Esme to distract him, because she had never looked her age. She’d always looked like a baby. 

But the stealth generator Aya had pilfered and tinkered with failed, and the shopkeeper saw them. Esme had panicked when he’d grabbed Aya’s arm and the rest of their group ran off. She’d reached over the counter to grab the man’s hand and make him look at her. She had to do something to get Aya the chance to slip away.

“C’mon, we’re just kids!” She said. The angry glare on his face faded into a blank expression as she concentrated on making herself seem believable. “We’ll never try this again. We were just playing a game!”

“You were just playing a game,” he repeated robotically. Esme blinked in confusion and a shudder passed through his body, snapping him back to normal. He let go of Aya. “Right. You kids get out of here and find yourselves a different game to play. You’ll land yourself in trouble one of these days.”

“Yes, sir!” Esme gave him a little salute to distract him from Aya pocketing his wallet. Aya slipped their fingers through Esme’s and tugged her out of the storefront.

When they repeated the story that night in the abandoned house that the group of orphans hid out in, everyone had congratulated Esme. She was so charming, they said. It was her face. It was the baby fat she couldn’t get rid of, no matter how close to starvation she teetered. She was so charming and delightful and youthful, of course no one would doubt her, of course people would do what she said.

Esme swallowed down the unease that had taken root in the pit of her stomach. They were right. She was just a really good liar. It wasn’t anything weird. Whatever...flicker she’d felt, whatever that blank look on the man’s face had been--those were just her imagination.

Being a good liar was useful. She was always the one to talk to their marks. Sometimes she could just convince them to hand over the money that they needed. Sometimes, despite her best efforts, it didn’t work. But the older she got, the more she perfected her crooked smile, the louder she thought what she wanted them to do as she spoke the command aloud, the better she got at it. She was such a charming kid.

***

A lucky kid, too. Luckier than any kid on a backwater planet had a right to be. When the group eventually moved up, thought to bring some kind of justice back to the planet and steal from the crime syndicates, they always sent Aya and Esme in first. Aya because they’d finally gotten a stealth generator that worked, and Esme because she had an uncanny ability to choose the right path so that she wouldn’t be spotted. She knew what days were good for a stealth run, what days weren’t, even without the data from the others who watched the syndicate hideouts. She could close her eyes and take deep breaths and think, and then she’d know the answer.

She stopped caring how or why she could do things like this. She was fourteen, and what mattered was surviving. Helping her friends.

She’d been banned from the few cantinas in the area. Not because of her age (there are no children on Ord Mantell, not really), but because she was almost certainly cheating. Counting cards, or something. No one could have a winning streak like hers without cheating somehow. They didn’t believe her when she said she was just born lucky.

Not that Esme really believed it, either. Maybe all her luck now was a result of her definitely not being born lucky. Girls who were born lucky weren’t refugees when they were infants, weren’t dumped on planets like Ord Mantell, didn’t have mothers who turned to spice instead of raising them, didn’t have dead mothers who left them no other option than to be a criminal. She wasn’t lucky, but Goddess, she was a cockroach.

***

She saved Aya’s life the first time she realized something was going to happen before it did. They were both off planet by then, both fifteen years old, a misfit Twi’lek and their lucky charm who could walk through a nerf pen and still come out clean on the other side. They were stowaways first on the _Opal Star_ , a smuggler’s ship that had gone to Ord Mantell looking for a place to hide from the authorities for a while.

The rest of their group had given up on justice after seeing how well the criminals did. Only she and Aya had been left, and then with all of their former accomplices on the other side, they couldn’t risk robbing the syndicates anymore. Planning for Esme was nearly impossible, but they could definitely plan for Aya. They could prepare for Esme. They knew her too well.

Stowing away in an empty cargo bin had been their only option. They hadn’t cared what plane they would wind up on, only so long as it was a fresh start somewhere.

They’d been discovered, of course, because plans made by fifteen year old runaways had never been the best. They’d been lucky that Vis Droc, the Devaronian captain, had been more amused than angry at their stunt. He’d made them part of the crew, given them blasters and a few credits, given them the first home either of them had ever had.

Not that they didn’t work for it. A pair of kids could get through a spaceport unseen. Esme, Aya, Ozo, and Kiska disguised as some odd hybrid Twi’lek-Human family could get through customs even easier.

Aya finally had their hands on a real, reliable stealth generator, not one they’d had to tinker with until it functioned. They were a master at sneaking around. They and Esme still worked best as a team, with Esme distracting anyone who might notice, or just charming them into seeing something else. Vis had raised...whatever Devaronians had in place of eyebrows when he’d found out about Esme’s stranger abilities.

He’d sent them to deal with one of his rivals. Esme’s skills were the best suited for the job, and Esme never went anywhere without Aya at her side. If anyone could walk out of the confrontation with it ending well for both sides, it would be the two of them.

They’d handed over a container of weapons that neither teen knew was empty. Esme had promised that everything Zirn had ordered was inside. She’d seen the shudder pass over him, whatever that had to do with batting her eyes and speaking sweetly, a standard lie every time they made a drop. She and Aya had turned to leave.

Then she’d heard a blaster fire.

“Aya!” She screamed, throwing herself into her very confused companion to knock them to the ground, seconds before Zirn shot. The bolt went over their heads.

There was a moment of disorientation as Esme’s brain tried to reconcile the fact that she’d heard something before it happened. Then they were both on their feet and running for their lives. Aya was in stealth and Esme--Esme was listening to the blasters fire a second before they actually went off.

They made it back to the ship, impossibly, and flung themselves into Vis’s arms. They’d long since lost their pursuers, but there was still something comforting about it.

For the first time, Aya was looking at Esme with something like fear in their face as the ship lifted off. Aya repeated what happened to Vis, who started looking at Esme in a way that made her wholly uncomfortable. Not predatory, but as if she suddenly had a whole new value.

He started keeping her in the cockpit with him in the event of a firefight or a blockade they might need to slip through. She learned to pilot that way, watching over his shoulder and _feeling_ the right movement before they made it. Even if they had to dodge lasers far less often than Vis seemed prepared for, sometimes it was nice to have a living navicomputer that could pick out hyperspace routes or detours before they knew they needed to make a detour.

Still, she had liked it better when she was just a kid with a lucky streak and a charming smile, not...whatever she’d become.

***

The first time she walked in someone else’s memories, it was lying in Aya’s bunk, on top of her best friend, both of them sleeping soundly.

Esme had thought it was a weird dream. She’d only been to Ryloth once, but she still knew it at a glance. It was an odd place to be dreaming about. It was odder still that she was watching an older Twi’lek, green and spotted like Aya, pushing a crate onto the _Opal Star_. Vis watched the Twi’lek work from the side.

“Where’s this one going to again?” Vis asked.

The Twi’lek put a hand on the lid of the crate and looked down at it, almost sadly. “Not sure. Somewhere slavers aren’t going to look.”

Esme looked around. It was Ryloth, alright, but not the side of Ryloth she and the crew had seen before. This was a dusty town made of shanty huts riddled with blaster holes. They’d supplied weapons to towns like this before on other planets; places on the edge of the frontier on a world, or towns where the unfortunates wound up. They were easy pickings for slaving operations and anyone else who wanted to exploit them.

As wild as Ord Mantell had been, they’d never had much of an issue with slavers coming in, or not as far as Esme had ever seen. The Republic kept them at bay. Criminals like Vis, who knew how to game the system and grease the wheels so that they could keep supplying weapons to the army and the people who needed them, lived in the Republic’s blind spot.

“How much is this going to cost?” The Twi’lek spoke up again, bringing Esme’s attention back to the two men in front of her. She watched his lekku twitch. Growing up with Aya and a half dozen other Twi’leks meant her understanding of spoken Ryl was only slightly behind her Basic; her ability to understand the lekku part of the language was...lacking, to say the least.

Vis scoffed. “How long’ve we known each other? This is a personal favor. No charge.”

The Twi’lek let out a breath. The hand on top of the crate curled into a fist and he stepped back, out of the ship. “Alright. Get out of here.”

Esme drifted onto the ship after the crate, standing next to Vis. She waved her hand in front of his face and got absolutely no reaction. What a weird dream.

Something strangely soft passed over Vis’s face and was gone in a blink. He went to stand at the bottom of the ladder, calling up to the others. “Alright, let’s get moving!”

Esme stood behind him as he opened the crate just enough to peek in. Her breath caught in her throat as she looked in as well. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected, not really, after the Twi’lek had mentioned slavers. Inside of the crate was a very young Aya, wrapped up in blankets and pillows and fast asleep.

She woke with a start, rolling off of Aya and off of the bunk and into the floor of their room. Aya sat up at the thump and stared at her through bleary eyes. “Bad dream?”

Esme nodded, her mouth suddenly dry. She knew she couldn’t tell them what she’d really dreamed. She couldn’t even explain it to herself. But suddenly the past few years were much clearer: how Aya had known that the _Opal Star_ was a safe ship for two kids to hide out on; knew that they were gun runners and kept their hands clean of drugs; the way Vis had laughed when he’d opened a crate only for Aya to jump at him. Vis had saved Aya’s life once before. It was only natural that they would go back to him when things got rough.

Everything was clearer, sure, but they weren’t questions Esme had ever asked. She’d never wondered if it was just luck that they’d wound up on the perfect ship--if anything, she’d just assumed that it _was_ her luck, not some strange set of coincidences. She’d never wondered where Aya was from or how Aya came to be an orphan with the rest of them. She’d never wanted to know any of this, or at least, not like this. Not in some weird way she couldn’t explain.

***

She learned to deal with it, just as she learned to deal with everything else that she could do. By the time she was seventeen, still playing Vis’s copilot, still flashing bright smiles and baby blues at competitors and allies alike while Aya robbed them blind, it was just another skill in her strange repertoire. She used it to get along better with the crew. If she understood their pasts, then she understood them.

Or she thought she understood them. They were all smuggling for a variety of reasons, whether it was the money or the freedom or the fact that Vis let them take charity cases like arming freedom fighters, and she felt like she was at home amongst them. Until one night she overheard Vis, Kiska, Ozo, and Rothrrar talking about a job they absolutely could not do.

Running guns to Ord Mantellian natives was out of the question, they’d all said. There was a separatist movement, wanted independence for Ord Mantell. The Republic needed help, but the separatists weren’t making it easy for ships to get down to the planet. Vis was pretty sure they could make it, with Esme, but it was still a risk, and if the Republic lost the planet, it wouldn’t be pretty if someone found out they’d been on the wrong side. That was Vis’s thing: he took sides more than the rest of the crew combined, but he’d only act on it when it couldn’t come back to him.

They had gone out that night, leaving Aya and Esme behind to watch the ship and its cargo.

“Aya,” Esme said, turning to them with wide eyes.

“No.”

“Ord Mantell, Aya! Home!” Esme caught their hand before they could leave the room. “We could do it ourselves. I can pilot just as good as Vis, you know I can, and you can work the cannon if we need it. We respond to Rogun, tell him we’ll get it--we’re in and out! Before Vis even knows what we’ve done!”

Aya sighed. “If I say no, are you going to do this without me anyway?”

Esme’s face lit up and she dropped Aya’s hand. She was already heading towards the holo with her hands behind her back. “Absolutely!”

And that was how they wound up dodging through what was more or less a separatist blockade of their home planet, in a ship that was technically stolen, with guns that were probably stolen, and a frankly obscene number of ignored calls from Vis. Aya had stopped complaining after the sixth one. Mostly because Esme sent her to man the gun and then muted her com.

Their adventure didn’t last long. The guns and the ship were stolen within hours of being on the planet, and Esme wanted nothing more than to put a bolt between Skavak’s eyes, and Vis came with the crew on a ship neither girl had seen before. He took Aya back under his arm but had stopped Esme when she tried to slink, dejected, up the boarding ramp.

“Not today, kid. Rogun’s already heard about the guns. We’re lucky he’s not taking it out on the rest of us.” Vis sighed, drawing Esme in for a quick hug before pushing her back out of the ship. “You made your bed. When you’re done cleaning up this mess, find us again.”

Corso Riggs found her a few hours later after he finished getting patched up with whatever kolto was left in the hangar and connected offices. She wanted to make him believe she wasn’t crying, but there was something about him (maybe his familiar accent, maybe the way he was looking at her like she was a lost child) that made her fling herself at him and sob on his shoulder instead.

And when she’d finished, he just patted her shoulders and said, “C’mon, let’s go get your ship back.”

***

The first time someone called her “Force sensitive” she was standing next to Guss as she threw darts into the board on the wall of the cargo bay.

“I mean, my sister can’t be a Sith! That’d mean she’s--y’know, she can use the Force, and stuff, and I can’t, and that doesn’t really happen, right? I mean, there’s Theron, but that’s his mom, so if he had siblings, they’d be like him, so me and my sister would have to be the same, and I definitely can’t use the Force, so…” She hurled another dart with a little more force than was probably necessary, but ever since the Sith had approached her on Rishi claiming to be her presumably-dead elder sister, she’d had a lot of pent up emotions. “And even if she _could_ , the Jedi would’ve found her when she was a kid! We lived on Coruscant, they couldn’t’ve missed her!”

Guss just turned to look at her slowly. “You don’t know? Captain, you’re Force sensitive.”

Esme scoffed. “Haha, Guss. Fool me once.”

“You mind trick half the people we meet!” He exclaimed. When Esme looked at him, his eyes were wider than she’d thought physically possible. He was serious. “You really never noticed it?”

“Mind tricks have...stupid hand waving, and stuff. I don’t do that. I just lie to people.” She folded her arms defensively over her chest. A strange tingle rose up her spine. She couldn’t be Force sensitive, or whatever it was called. She was just a lucky girl.

“At least six people have shot at you point blank since I’ve met you, and none of them have hit you.” Guss was either as bad at reading her body language as Esme thought, or he was just really determined.

Esme scuffed her shoe against the floor. “I dunno, I just hear the blaster before it goes off, that’s not really...it-it is weird, isn’t it?”

Guss just nodded. Esme sank to the ground, darts abandoned beside of her as she buried her face in her hands. Just like when she’d seen Aya’s memories what felt like a lifetime earlier, things suddenly made sense, but this time, these were questions she had asked. How had she always been so lucky? How had things always worked out as they did for her?

She hadn’t spoken Ryl in a while, but it didn’t take fluency to groan out a long string of shockingly colorful expletives. Then she took a deep breath, pulled herself together, and absolutely did not notice the floating darts beside of her.

“Guss.” She caught his eyes when he looked down at her, a strangely serious look on her face. The constant smirk was gone, as was a bit of the light in her eyes. “This doesn’t leave this room, okay? No one else is ever going to find out about this. No one’s going to take me away from my crew.”

So she was Force sensitive. So maybe there was a possibility that the Sith was telling the truth. But none of that mattered, not really. She had her ship, she had her crew, and she didn’t need anything else. She didn’t need the Jedi or the Sith. All Esme really needed was her luck.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An explanation: Esme has an intense dislike of the Jedi (and the Sith, but she hates them for a lot of other reasons) because she knows they will take children away from their families, and she fears losing her family again above all else. And a consolation: due to her age, there is no flirting or romance happening in Esme's storyline. Corso's like a brother and while Esme might flirt, no one's flirting back.


	4. Appearances

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ace isn't half as good an actress as she thinks she is.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote about a third of this while I had food poisoning and decided someone else needed to suffer with me, and Andronikos/femquis continues to be my favorite thing.

Andronikos is the first to figure out that Ace isn’t what she seems.

It doesn’t come to him all at once. It’s a collection of little things she does, little idiosyncrasies, that make his brows lift and make him want to know more. Saying that there’s something “not right” about her seems obvious; she’s Sith, there’s nothing right with any of them. She’s got a gift with sharp words and a cruel twist to her mouth, shoulders pushed back and saber prominently displayed at her hip, but none of those feel quite natural. They’re adaptations.

He suspects something the first time they meet, when she knocks on the door to his room in the cantina and waits for him to open it. He opens his mouth to say something snappy, but shuts it as soon as he actually looks at her. He redirects his frustration at being found to Webb, because he might not be the brightest man in the galaxy, but he knows you don’t snap at a Sith.

She introduces herself (her name is Ace). Shakes his hand (she’s like a dead fish). Says she didn’t want to interrupt his business, didn’t want to barge in and startle him.

(He’s about to tell her she didn’t when she turns and calls for someone to come in from the hall, and she might not startle him, but the seven foot monstrosity looming behind her certainly does.)

He starts idly thinking about it after his first night on the ship with her. She gives him free reign of the whole craft, even appoints him as the pilot without asking too many questions.

Ace is happy while she chats with Zash on the holo about their adventure on Tatooine, but as soon as Alderaan is mentioned, Andronikos sees a flicker on her face that belies her sardonic nature. It’s the same expression some of his former crewmates got when they saw him coming for them. He’d call it “pants-pissing fear”, but she is Sith, and he’s pretty sure Sith don’t piss their pants.

He looks away for a moment after the call ends because the droid knocks something over in the cockpit, and when he looks back, Ace is gone, the sound of her door locking echoing through the ship. She leaves him alone with Khem Val. He gets out of the lounge as fast as he can, before the Dashade decides that regular humans taste just as good as Force-users.

They’ve been flying for a few hours and he’s just starting to slip into the trance of piloting when there’s a soft knock on the doorframe. She knocks on the doorframe of her own ship to announce her presence so she doesn’t sneak up on him. And stars, she looks ridiculous, in what he assumes is a nightgown and with her already-short hair chopped in such a way that he wonders if there’s a scissor-wielding child on the ship he needs to be aware of.

Ace asks for his help, and that’s her tell. She asks, she doesn’t demand. She gives him a chance to refuse her before she offers him the scissors and sits on the floor an arm’s length away from him. She doesn’t even complain when he finishes cutting her hair to a military-regulation length, which he’s pretty sure is not what she was hoping for, but it’s the only thing he can do with any certainty and it’s the only way to salvage what she’d done. She also doesn’t stab him when he brushes a clump of hair off of her shoulder, the touch making her flinch. He makes a note to touch her as little as possible after that. There’s half a dozen reasons for her to be that jumpy, and he doesn’t want to prod at any of them.

(Like he doesn’t want to prod at the carved scars on the back of her neck. She’s got a story, and if she wants him to know it, she’ll tell him when she’s ready.)

She confirms it herself their first night on Alderaan, although it's clear she never meant to. They're guests of the Thuls, given a set of connecting rooms and a set of slaves to look after them, but she dismisses the slaves out of hand. No, that's not quite the right way to put it. She sends the slaves into his room to rest and asks him if he minds staying in the room with her. He doesn't dare say no. 

Ace has been a different person since they landed on the planet, and Andronikos isn't sure what to think of the change. She clearly has history with the Thuls. Some of them recognize her immediately, like Elena, while others give her lingering looks as they pass, like they're trying to place her face. He walks a little closer to her with his hand resting on his blaster. It's not an overt threat to the nobles, but even he can feel how uncomfortable she is, and he's as Force-sensitive as a rock. 

The Thuls invited them to dinner as well, but she'd refused with an iciness that he was quickly learning was out of character for his Sith. 

(Andronikos also isn't sure what to make of the fact that he’s starting to think of her as “his Sith” even though he's only known her for a few weeks.)

Which was how she wound up stubbornly eating a ration pack that he was pretty sure had expired before either of them were born, and three hours later, now hangs her head over the toilet, retching violently. 

He pats her back gently, and this time she doesn't flinch, but he's pretty sure that's because he's standing where she can see him out of the corner of her watery eyes. He's learned that her pathological desire not to sneak up on him comes from a pathological desire not to be snuck up _on_ , a mistake he made only once when he touched her shoulder to wake her after she'd fallen asleep on the couch in the ship’s lounge. He thinks he lost consciousness for a few seconds when he hit the far wall. Not that he could blame her; he really should've known better. 

“Want me to see if I can find you some meds?” He offers, even though they both know that there's nothing in a medcenter that could do anything for her at this point. There might be something to push the nausea back, but she's just got to get everything out before she can feel better. 

“S’not gonna help,” She mumbles in return, turning her head slightly to look at him. She doesn't realize what she's done until his eyes widen. 

The voice that comes out of her is not the sharp, clipped, perfectly maintained Dromund Kaas accent he’s so used to. It's pitiful and miserable, yes, as she has every right to be, but her accent is purely Coruscanti.

They stare at one another for several long moments as the knowledge that his Sith is Coruscanti slots into place. He's not sure exactly what it means, not really, but it somehow makes perfect sense that the strange woman is not a pure-blooded Imperial. 

He pats her back again. “You can explain it when you want to.”

He thinks she smiles. Not the smirk he’s seen so often, but a real smile, something soft and uncharacteristically genuine. Then she gags again and the moment’s lost.

(She's Coruscanti. She's got to be. Her Kaas accent is good, but now that he knows, he notices little flaws with it. How does a girl from Coruscant become a Sith?)

Andronikos is still turning it over in his head long after Ace finally falls asleep. He doesn't sleep much, not really, so he's sitting on the couch, cleaning his blaster (not a euphemism) late into the night. When she gets out of bed, he lifts his head to see if she’s making a run for the toilet. Instead, Ace opens the bedroom door and walks right out, still in her nightgown.

He follows her. It’s obvious from the slow, languid way she’s moving that she’s sleepwalking. Someone’s got to keep an eye on her. Who knows what a Sith can do while they’re asleep.

He doesn’t intend to wake her. He really doesn’t. Either she’ll go back to the room on her own or she’ll lay down somewhere else and he’ll cart her back. But then he loses her around a corner for a few seconds, and when he sees her again, he moves without even thinking about it.

Ace has climbed over a railing of the second floor balcony, poised to throw herself to her death on the entryway below. Maybe it wouldn’t kill her. But Andronikos isn’t sure, he doesn’t want to find out, and he’s not going to let her kill herself in her sleep. He grabs her under her arms and hauls her back over the railing roughly enough that it wakes her and she, in the way he’s seen her do to so many unsuspecting people, electrocutes him. He holds onto her until she jerks away and turns to look at him, fury in her eyes replaced with shock.

“Andronikos?” She whispers, and she’s back to being the perfect Imperial, all traces of her earlier slip gone. “What are you doing? How did I--how did I get here?”

There’s still a few volts kicking his ass, so he doesn’t manage to answer her, instead focusing on breathing, which really seems more important at the moment. She seems to realize that she’s hurt him, and though she doesn’t apologize, she waits for him to get himself back together.

“Thought you were sleepwalking, but then you tried to jump.” He makes a vague motion at the railing behind her with a shaking hand.

She looks back and leans over the railing, her mouth open in surprise. He moves closer just in case she tries it again, and that brings him close enough to get a real good look at the scars on the back of her neck. The carved _brand_ on the back of her neck. It looks an awful lot like the Thul crest emblazoned on the floor below them.

(She explains, long after they’ve left Alderaan’s atmosphere with a handful of Thul slaves smuggled in the cargo hold. She drops her accent when she tells him the truth, and the nervous look on her face undermines the confident way she tells him that if it’s changed what he thinks of her, he’s welcome to leave at the next spaceport.

“I work for you, not the Empire,” He snorts. “This is a good gig. Good ship, good company, and enough trouble to keep me on my toes. I'm not quitting that just because you used to be someone else.”

When she smiles, it’s the same genuine thing he saw on Alderaan, only brighter. She touches him this time, patting his hand.

It’s a start.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ace has a very long 15 year history as a slave in the Thul estate; this is sort of the vague version of it.


End file.
